Tom Clancy: when writing becomes a video game

Without remorse, film released on April 30 on Prime Video, is a film that any lover of a certain videogame genre could love: it is in fact the "prequel" of Rainbow Six, or the origin story of the founder of the legendary special anti-terrorism team protagonist of the homonymous videogame series by Ubisoft, John Clark.

A violent and pressing action film, starring the star Michael B. Jordan, as a director the españolesssimo Stefano Sollima and which represents the return of the stories of one of the most important authors of fiction on the US scene, Tom Clancy.

To celebrate the event, today we present an examination of a literary author who has perhaps built in forty years of career the first transmedia narrative universe in which the video game played a fundamental role.

Are you ready? Let's begin!

A bestselling author

The link between Tom Clancy and the video game begins very early, five years after his debut book Hunt for Red October (1982), and continues in a linear and clear manner until the author's death, albeit with some differences (which we will see shortly).

At the time of Hunt for Red October (the game, 1987), Clancy had already established himself as the father of a real genre, the military technothriller, made up of stories that shaken episodes of Cold War warfare, international intrigue and a bit of healthy 80s American machismo.

The novels of Clancy - an insurer who has always been passionate about the military world and then became the best-selling author - are long "post-modern epics" in which a few extraordinary heroes have to save the world from external enemies such as the always dear and old USSR, terrorists from around the world, drug traffickers and so on and so forth.

They are in fact spy novels, but literally chock full of historical and technical details taken from confidential military manuals that Clancy could consult thanks to high-ranking friends within the US military and administrations (including various Republican presidents, such as Roland Reagan).

Clancy's literature - as well as the cinema based on it, which relied on performances by actors such as Sean Connery and Harrison Ford - is a kind of celebration of American militarism, stories with a conservative soul that ask themselves few questions about who after all is the "good" in the global geopolitical chessboard.

And he was nevertheless one of the few authors able to create a good "narrative universe" that did not refer to fantasy, horror or science fiction imagery. In fact, Clancy has carried out several cycles of novels with different but coexisting protagonists in the same world, in particular the aforementioned John Clark (Rainbow Six) and analyst Jack Ryan, protagonist of many novels including the Hunt for Red October himself (or, as known before the film, "The Great Red October Escape"). A series was also dedicated to Ryan, again by Amazon Prime, released in 2018, which effectively "refounded" the audiovisual canon dedicated to the brand and laid the foundations for a sort of "Clancyverse" (of which also "Senza Rimorso " it's part).

A real entertainment industry based on the political thriller.

Tom Clancy and the video game

Now, no one will be surprised to be told (again) that they were taken from Clancy's universe some of the luckiest action videogame brands in the history of the medium, at least as far as the "western" industry is concerned.

If between the late 80s and early 90s Hunt for Red October and other novels inspired real tie-ins between movies and video games, in 1998 things get complicated.

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, the historic tactical fps that generated an infinite series of games that survived from gen to gen up to today, was in fact something different, a sort of reworking of the original novel that bent the basic idea (the story of the missions of an international anti-terrorism special team) to the logic of a gameplay for the revolutionary era, based on the close coupled "planning-action" within labyrinthine structures.

There is no need to think about the success of Rainbow Six, since it is there for all to see.

Production is in the hands of Red Storm Entertainment, a software house that not only uses Clancy's creative licenses, but which was founded by Tom Clancy, which in fact made it into a sort of "copyright company" in a short time. Through it, Clancy wrote video game subjects, billionaire video games that turned out to be real business.

After all, the war game is a workhorse of Industry, and Clancy, in fact, wrote works that are also war novels.

And that was just the beginning.

Of course it was something gradual, born as a "niche" compared to more mainstream FPS such as Medal of Honor or Battlefield, and then exploded in an extraordinary way with Siege (2015), but from the very first steps the name Clancy ends up creating a space in the Industry.

In 2001 it was the turn of Ghost Recon, focused on the tactical actions of small commando in the open field, and in 2002 Splinter Cell, almost an American response and more full of solid "Americanism" to the sensational success of Metal Gear Solid.

And here we are already at another level of our story and Clancy's business strategy, because neither Splinter Cell nor Ghost Recon are based on pre-existing novels. Instead, they are based on author scripts, written by the American writer himself, which carry on other narrative strands.

In fact, it is with these projects that Clancy went from being a simple writer to a screenwriter or, better still, creative supervisor of these projects.

The formula evidently worked, because Clancy came to work on smaller or less successful projects such as Endwar or HAWX, no doubt more niche than the projects listed above, and practically at the same time as his death (2013/14) to an ambitious project with an even more peculiar narrative objective, namely the online tps saga The Division. An atypical saga by Clancy's narrative standards, which passes to post-apocalyptic and survival scenarios of an America consumed by a lethal virus that has brought violence and anarchy.

A lucky idea, which gave birth to an original, strong brand, which after a second episode (2019) will soon be enriched with Heartland, free-to-play due out in 2022 at the latest (who the news).

All under the aegis of an exceptional major: Ubisoft, which in 2000 acquired Red Storm and the license of the "Tom Clancy's" brand still standing out on the titles of all the games connected with the author's work.

From the novel to the videogame subject

What does the story of Tom Clancy and his relationship with the video game teach us?

Mainly two things.

The first is that even before he was a writer, Clancy was a great entrepreneur of himself, able to understand that his creations were first and foremost the perfect material for a robust and well oiled money making machine.

This is not new (other authors have done a similar thing), but Clancy took it to a truly masterful level of effectiveness, no matter how you think about the type of games, on their artistic value and even on the "ideology" that moved the American (to all intents and purposes, a very convinced conservative).

But there is another level, deeper and more universal: Clancy has opened a way that many others should and could follow. A writer with a fairly robust "poetics" and a well-defined audience, at ease with a certain highly expendable pop imagery, puts his "art" at the service of the video game and elevates the latter to a different declination of originally literary stories, building a small universe of gamified narratives that are coherent in their own way.

In fact, through a 100% commercial work, with very little "noble" purposes, Clancy has believed in the video game since its first steps, "supported" it, in a certain sense, ennobled it within the entertainment industry "that matters" in a similar way to how other authors had ennobled cinema or radio at the time by writing for them.

Not bad, really.